In an era of digital media disruption, Africa Confidential has avoided the complicated revenue tools many news media have been forced to experiment with, like soft or metered paywalls, crowdfunding, programmatic ads, blockchain systems or slashed costs and access fees. Instead, the London-based political news group has defied global trends by not only retaining its old school subscription model, but actually increasing its annual cost to a sky-high 902 British pounds. Rowan Philp writes for GIJN on AC’s secret to success.

ByGIJN Staff |January 18, 2019

With the global spread of data journalism, the advent of artificial intelligence and the increasing use of big data moving alongside a rapid rise of disinformation, GIJN asked data journalism experts around the world what they anticipate for 2019. Here are their thoughts on the major trends, ideas and technologies that will affect how we do our jobs.

ByYing Chan, Siran Liang and Lizzy Huang |January 16, 2019

Chinese journalists have broken stories this year on medical abuses, #MeToo and the environment, leading to government prosecution, consumer uproar and boycott, and disciplinary actions. Here are some of the best investigative journalism work in China in 2018, nominated by practicing Chinese journalists and media professionals, and selected by the GIJN Chinese team.

ByGIJN Staff |January 15, 2019

With the backlash against democracy and anti-press sentiment growing, the need for investigations around issues such as corruption and climate change continues to rise. GIJN asked the leaders of our global community about what they see happening in investigative journalism around the world in 2019. Here’s what they told us.

ByGIJN Staff |January 14, 2019

The 2019 Global Investigative Journalism Conference is scheduled for September 26-29 in Hamburg, Germany. Designed by journalists for journalists, GIJC19 will feature cutting-edge panels, workshops and networking sessions, ranging from cross-border collaboration and corruption tracking to advanced data analysis. Here’s an opportunity for you to propose great ideas on compelling panels, workshops and other presentations.

Paul McNally produced what was South Africa’s first investigative podcast around the story of a wrongful conviction. Here’s what he discovered while writing, producing and editing Alibi — with some advice on how you can avoid making the same mistakes.

Unidentified men on motorbikes shot Ahmed Hussein-Suale three times in the capital Accra, according to local media reports. Hussein-Suale was a member of Tiger Eye Private Investigations and had investigated corruption in Ghana's football leagues. The undercover report on cash gifts led to a lifetime ban for the former head of Ghana's Football Association. BBC Africa Eye made a documentary about the scandal last year after gaining access to the investigation led by journalist Anas Aremayaw Anas, who runs Tiger Eye. After the BBC broadcast the football documentary, Ghanaian MP Kennedy Agyapong circulated photos of Mr Hussein-Suale and called for retribution against him.

Foreign Policy is releasing its annual list of the top 100 Global Thinkers. While the full list goes live on next week, the publication is slowly releasing its picks. Three journalists have already been named. Eliot Higgins, from GIJN member Bellingcat, has been tapped following “breakthrough revelations” from Ukraine and Syria, using open-source intelligence to track down the identities of two Russian operatives who allegedly poisoned former spy Sergei Skripal in the UK. Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were jailed for their investigation into ongoing violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar, have also been named.

The Waseda Chronicle, Japan's first nonprofit investigative reporting center, unveiled a major project this week exposing nearly $245 million in payments by the pharmaceutical industry to the nation's medical doctors. At the center of the project is a public database, “Money for Docs,” which the reporting team pulled together despite barriers of cost and access put up by the industry. Included are payments made by 71 pharmaceutical firms. Japan's pharma industry is the world's third largest, after the US and China. Fees for "lectures" accounted for 84% of the payments, the team found.

Myanmar’s High Court rejected the appeal of two Reuters journalists jailed last year on charges of violating the country’s colonial-era secrets law. Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, were sentenced in September to seven years in prison by a district court after a months-long trial in which a key prosecution witness admitted in court that their arrests were a setup. The two journalists were reporting on the situation of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority. More than 720,000 Rohingya have fled violence in the country.

The formation of the newly-created Investigative Centre of Ján Kuciak (ICJK) was announced this week. Named after the Slovak journalist who was murdered last year, ICJK aims to be a platform for the collaboration of Slovak investigative journalists with their colleagues abroad, as well as those working in other Slovak media outlets. Based on the model of the Czech Centre for Investigative Journalism, ICJK has already signed an agreement with the OCCRP, which unites and supports journalism projects focused on revealing corruption and international organized crime in more than 30 countries on four continents.

Journalist Pelin Ünker has been sentenced to jail over the Paradise Papers investigation after being found to have defamed Turkey’s former prime minister and two of his sons. An Istanbul court sentenced the ICIJ member to imprisonment for 13 months for “defamation and insult.” Ünker, who reported that former prime minister Binali Yildirim and his sons owned companies in Malta in the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, was also fined $US1615. Prime minister from May 2016 to July 2018, Yildirim became speaker of Turkey’s Grand National Assembly after the post of Prime Minister was abolished. Following her sentencing, Ünker told ICIJ that she intended to appeal what was an extraordinary but unsurprising court ruling. Ünker said what made the “world first” ruling so remarkable was that the complainants acknowledged that her articles were true.